Tag Archives: 24 second news

The two-second news spot?

As if the 24-second spot weren’t condensed enough (thanks CNN), we now seem to be moving into nano-news era. On top of that, via services such as blogs, Twitter, wikipedia and others, the proliferation of news services and sources seems to be accelerating. And, the reliability is being hurt in equal parts by non-professionals and a desperate rush to be the first one out. For example, if you receive BREAKINGNEWSON from Twitter, you can find yourself bombarded at times in the day (evidently according to when Breakingnewson is awake AND, as Breakingnewson warns, when there are BIG stories) with micro bulletins that, at worst, are free flowing “unconfirmed” reports. But, to be fair, breakingnewson does seem to be quite on the ball and attempts to be clear in the headlines. For now, I will keep on following.

If you take the time to read the entire The Onion article, passed on to me by my father and the reason I decided on this post, you may be as perplexed as I am over the this quote at the end of the article:

“While the changes have brought higher ratings and ad revenues to televised news, print newspapers have suffered greatly, due to the high cost of printing and distributing a new edition every 24 seconds.”

How many newspapers are being reprinted every 24 seconds? Perhaps, this is merely a point in case of a journalist that had to crush out this report without really double checking the thoughts? Last I checked, Internet stories didn’t need to be printed out and “distributed” either.